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Two months after South Australia banned fish-shaped plastic soy sauce, the entrepreneurs behind Sydney-based design studio Heliograf have released a home-compostable alternative that still retains its original charm.
Founded by Angus Ware and Jeffrey Simpson, Heliograf is finalising the production of a new plastic-free home compostable soy fish dropper known as Holy Carp.
Manufactured using bagasse – a fibrous residue left after juice is extracted from sugar cane - the product can hold soy for up to 48 hours and complies with all plastic bans.
Speaking with Business News Australia, Ware shared how the founders are receiving an influx of requests to get their hands on the product, which is currently undergoing the final stages of the pre-production process.
“We've been working with a few restaurants in our network already to refine the design. We haven't done real-world trials yet because the samples that we have weren't actually made in the full food-grade facility,” Ware said.
“We've had lots of interest from other restaurants and distributors...stacks of people coming forward and saying ‘We've been looking for something like this for years.’”
“We're kind of blown away going. ‘Oh my god. How are we going to serve a global audience for this product as quickly as people would want them?’ Which is super exciting.”
Demand for the company’s latest product is strong, with Ware noting that the company is focused on rolling out Holy Carp in Australia and then expanding internationally to markets such as the US, Europe, South America and Asia.
This has been a long-time passion project for the duo, who released the Light Soy, a soy fish lamp made with ocean-bound plastic, back in 2020.
With every sale of the lamp, the company commits to cleaning up 2kg of plastic in regions that contribute most to ocean plastic. To date, Heliograf has helped clean up to 32 tons of ocean-bound plastic.
“It's always been crazy to me that something shaped like a fish would potentially be chucked on the ground, washed into the ocean, float around for hundreds of years, causing harm to marine life,” Ware said.
“Then the microplastics inevitably break down, potentially ending up back in our food supply and in the very fish that we're eating with our sushi.
“I was always very focused on that and trying to highlight and show how something so small could add up to a big problem.”
The news of Holy Carp’s production comes two months after the South Australian government banned the use of single-use soy sauce fish containers. The ban also includes straws, cutlery, expanded polystyrene (EPS) cups and bowls.
According to the SA government, community consultation showed overwhelming support for banning single-use plastic items, with 97 per cent of more than 3,000 survey respondents backing the move.
When asked about the call made in SA to ban the soy sauce plastics, Ware welcomed the government’s decision.
“We've always approached it from a perspective of trying to be really positive. I think there's a tendency to obsess over the impossibility of the scale of the problem,” he said.
“We've always felt like if we make these small, iterative steps in the right direction, we can actually do really amazing things.
“We wanted to always make people feel empowered to make choices and be more sustainable…I think now that we're seeing compostable materials have really come a long way, it's probably necessary that governments do just make the call and say: It's time.”
Heliograf is aiming to go into production with the final version of Holy Carp in early 2026.
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